Easter

This past weekend we had "General Conference" for my church. All of our leaders speak to us in four different sessions of 2 hours each on Saturday and Sunday. It's a lot of time, but it's totally a spiritual feast. I love it. It's not exactly what it used to be when I could sit and really listen to what is being said. A lot of my time now is dealing with tantrums and messy diapers but I also get to teach my children about the gospel of Jesus Christ through conference and I wanted to share an experience I had in doing that that was so beautiful to me:

Parker had been missing his "Lightning McQueen" cars for a few days. I had looked everywhere for them but just could not find them. During conference I was really thinking about Parker and how he is so receptive right now and there was a talk on teaching our children faith and I realized I needed to say a prayer with Parker to find his toys. I have said many prayers like this for seeminly trivial things I have lost or am in need of throughput my life and the Lord has so often aswered me. Though it may seem insignificant, these experiencse have been a foundation of my faith. I remember that happening as a very young child, being taught by the example of my mother, and finding something that was lost. It really was a foundation of my faith, that God knew me and really listened to me, even when it seemed so unimportant. So Sunday afternoon, after the morning conference session, I explained to Parker that Heavenly Father can help us when we need him, even when are missing something important to us. So Parker and I knelt down and with the faith of a child, he gave a beautiful prayer- "Heavenly Father, help me to find my Lightning McQueen toys. Name of Jesus Christ Amen." "Where do you think we should look Parker?" "in my closet" (said without hesitation). In the meantime I offered my own silent prayer to Heavenly Father. I really did want to find the toys, but mostly I wanted my sweet son to have his own faith promoting experience and I didn't want him to be let down. I was really putting my faith in God that he would come through. Like I said, I had searched the house for these toys for two days and they were nowhere to be found. But we went into Parkers room, looked in the closet, then under the bed and then in a bag I suddenly thought about checking and within 4 minutes we had found the cars. The bag. "Look Parker!" A smile lit up his face and tears immediately sprung to my eyes. "Let's go show daddy!" We raced out into the living room where we showed daddy what we had found (he had been looking too). "Now Parker, we need to say a prayer and thank Heavenly Father for helping us." So all three of us knelt and said a prayer of gratitute to Heavenly Father. My voice choked at the end. These were the beginnings of my testimony when I was a child and now my son, the beginning for his testimony too. This morning as we were talking about the purpose of Easter I asked him what Jesus does for us and he said "Helps us find our Lightning McQueen toys. I prayed"

The faith of a child.